


Infected

by Ransomedbard



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Aliens, Best Friends, Character Growth, Gen, Preventers (Gundam Wing), Rip-off of a rip-off of Alien, Suicidal Thoughts, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 05:45:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15790164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ransomedbard/pseuds/Ransomedbard
Summary: Infected with an alien pathogen that had already transformed several of her Preventer colleagues into mindless berserkers, Hilde was secretly glad to be left behind in the station’s brig to die alone. But she hadn’t reckoned on Duo deserting his squad and his duty to go ‘rescue’ her.  Now on their own with a horde of alien monsters separating them from potential rescue, and afraid that her time is rapidly running out, she must press Duo to reveal the truth about what happened during her blackout, and weigh the cost of granting his wish for her to live against her fear of losing control.





	Infected

“Hilde.”

“Hey, Hilde.”

“Hilde, are you in there?”

When she opened her eyes, Duo was crouching on the floor next to where she lay, a pistol in his hand. His clothes were unfamiliar - the Preventers uniform was gone, replaced by some dark lumpy vest. Other than that, she could identify virtually nothing in the glare of the battery-operated light - just a vague impression of a ceiling high overhead, and rows of towering shelves stacked with boxes. It was definitely not the last place she remembered - the inside of the station’s brig.

“Well hello,” he said, sounding relieved. “Don’t move around too much - you’ve had a concussion. Gunshot wound too, above the left hip.”

He lifted his left arm and her right hand rose with it, pulled up by the handcuffs that bound them together. “And, there’s this. Sorry, it was the best I could do.” 

She took a minute to sort that all out. In a way, she was grateful for the concussion; it explained why she didn’t know where they were or how she got injured, and her sense that a lot of time had passed. She ran her free hand over the wound dressing and found it felt well packed and dry. The pain was significant, but she’d always had a pretty high tolerance for it, and this wasn’t the first time she’d been shot in her career. It was the progression of her other symptoms that she was worried about: the occasional pull of muscles that wanted to move of their own accord, a propensity to want to twist up instead of remaining flat, and most of all the feeling that her very bones and sinews were by turns straining and softening. Experimentally, she spread her free hand out and watched her fingertips curl back alarmingly toward her arm. Yup, it was definitely getting worse. And she was out here, loose. She stared dully at the cuff. “You should have left me in there.”

“And what kind of friend would I be to do that?” he replied lightly. He had tucked away the gun and was sitting on the floor by the lamp now, methodically stripping the coating off the end of a wire with an odd tool that wasn’t suited for the job - some sort of little screwdriver, by the looks of it. Her eyes were so sensitive to the light that they kept closing of their own volition, adding to her sense of disorientation.

This was crazy, even for him. Breaking her out of quarantine was probably enough to subject him to court-martial, let alone deserting his squad during a mission. And handcuffs? What was that supposed to do if she - wait, had she already?

“Did I hurt anybody?”

Duo focused on scraping curly swirls of rubber off the wire, which rested on a large tray balanced across his knees. “You don’t need to worry about that. It’s just us in here, and we’ve got enough supplies now to last until help arrives.” 

That was a yes, then. She should ask who, or how many, or how badly, but the words stuck in her throat. She was suddenly angry as hell at him for sacrificing somebody else because he couldn’t accept that it was too late for her. _I don’t want this on my conscience, damnit._

She watched in silence as he finished preparing the wire, then put it aside and started on another one. His posture was awkward, his cuffed hand stretched out to where she lay on a short stack of cardboard. When he noticed her watching, he gestured over at a small cluster of rechargeable batteries he’d apparently scavenged from various devices.

“Workin’ on a way to power my radio - ran out of juice about 12 hours ago, so I haven’t had contact since then.” From that, she gathered she’d been out - or rather, ‘not herself’ for longer than that. “Henderson and Yao’s teams are focusing on securing and prepping the number 18 dock,” he continued. “That’s where the fleet will come in. Big ESUN ships, so they’ll have a sickbay, doctors. That’s our goal.”

“Wufei took everyone else and the handful of civilians they found and made for the big toolshop in block D - last I heard they had found a store of maintenance equipment they could repurpose, including an _actual flamethrower_.” He stopped scraping for a moment and stared off into the distance. “I’m … I’m pretty jealous of that.”

She couldn’t help a small smile. “He always gets the cool toys.” Guns would be better, of course, but there weren’t supposed to be any firearms on this station - officially, anyway - and when their rapid response squad deployed for this mission they had stocked a normal loadout of ammo and armaments, unaware that it would be laughably insufficient because this time their adversaries weren’t smugglers or terrorists - or even human.

The mission briefing from Preventer HQ had not given them much to go on. H-940 was a sizeable but sparsely populated private station in the L3 cluster. The owner, Tiankong Trading, listed it as a warehouse and repair center for their fleet of cargo vessels. Three separate emergency calls had been logged, reporting massive systems failures, missing persons, and most bizarrely, reports of “monsters” lurking in the now darkened station. Headquarters suspected a mix of sabotage and some sort of mass poisoning with a hallucinogenic. 

Their ship had successfully docked at one of the bays that still had power, and the first hour of the operation was smooth; all teams deployed for reconnaissance and returned to the rendezvous to report finding substantial damage but no contact with anyone, threat or otherwise. Then all hell broke loose. 

She hadn’t really had the time to process what they were - aliens or some bio-engineered monstrosity - although her money was on the former because they were simply unlike anything she’d ever seen: hunched and bare, like a plucked chicken, yet spiky like an insect. They were not much larger than a medium sized dog, but their strength was tremendous. The creatures had little in the way of intelligence and didn’t seem to hunt as a pack; they just swarmed forward, viciously pursuing and attacking anything that moved. They had a powerful set of limbs that served as both legs that propelled them in high jumps through the station’s weak gravity, and grasping arms with talons that ripped apart metal and flesh alike. On the underside, there were several smaller striking appendages they used when they got close; they were covered in barbs that broke off and buried themselves under the skin. She resisted the urge to feel the line of lumps on her left arm where they had pierced her.

After their first engagement, where they had lost a third of their number outright, they retreated to the station’s corporate offices, which had a small store of medical supplies. They were focused on the triage of traumatic injuries, so at first no one even noticed when Hilde’s teammate Jack, who was only lightly wounded, became incoherent and fell out of his chair. It escalated as his body bent and twisted unnaturally; he began striking out wildly, attacking everything in sight. They had nothing to spare to sedate him with, so they put him in a cell in the brig. Then Lucy went crazy, and Ahmad, and they realized the common factor was that each of them had been stung by the creatures’ barbs. 

When the quarantine was announced, Hilde didn’t wait for an examination to confirm what she already knew; she walked down and put herself in a cell. Then she watched as Jack and the others suffered through episodes where they writhed and smashed and flailed - mutely, with vacant eyes - only to pass out and come back to themselves briefly before it began again, until they succumbed to a final bout of contortion from which they never rose. It was all over in a matter of hours.

And then she was down there all alone, after the bodies of her teammates had been quietly taken away. Duo came as often as he could, of course, and Wufei and the others brought her rations and news, neither of which were good. They couldn’t make it back to their own ship to evacuate, and they were critically low on ammunition and medical supplies; two more of the wounded had died. The only bright spot was that they had managed to patch in to a relay transmitter outside the station and contact headquarters; help of some sort was on the way, but the Earth Sphere government was now in charge and it was slow to mobilize. 

“You shoulda seen Wufei’s face when the military brass briefed us that this mission is now classified as Top Secret and tried to scare us about leaks,” Duo gossiped with forced energy as he slid a small bag of chips he’d liberated from a vending machine through the bars of her cell. “All these years of debunking De Santos’ nutty government cover-up conspiracy theories and now he’s _in_ one. I think the man might just send an unencrypted transmission to any satellite he can ping out of spite.” 

And so it went. For two days she’d held on to hope: that she might be immune, that once help arrived maybe they could use her to make a vaccine or something. That she would cheat death again. But by the start of the third day she couldn’t write off the involuntary twitching as just sleep deprivation; couldn’t ignore the feel of those damned barbs, that had been curved like a cashew when they went in but were now straightening out, painfully deep under her skin. And then she had drifted off leaning up against a wall, only to be startled awake when her hand snapped out and grabbed hold of a bar of her cell entirely on its own. She had held it curled up to her chest afterwards for hours, fearing the betrayal of her own body.

The next time she woke, Duo was sprawled on the floor outside her cell with his eyes closed, still in full gear except for his helmet and his body armor, which he was using as a pillow. She must have made a noise because he opened one eye and smiled at her.

“You’re going to get a crick in your neck like that,” she said softly.

“It’s more comfortable than it looks,” he replied, sitting up and pulling something small out of the body armor where he had been resting his head. “Look, I found these upstairs in the executive bathroom.” He unfolded and held up a square white monogrammed washcloth. “It’s not much, but I figured you might wanna be able to wash your face or have a littl’ pillow.” He folded it back up and handed them to her.

“Thanks.” She took the small stack out of his hands and set them on her lap, instantly forgotten, then reached out her arm through the bars again, a silent request. He scooted up to the bars and held her hand between both of his, the metal in his gloves cold from resting on the floor.

“Duo, it’s starting.” That was all she could get out for a moment, as the tears she couldn’t avoid started to fall. “I feel like I’m having to fight to control my body - like my muscles are starting to try to move on their own, to twist up or lash out. It’s only occasionally so far, but we both know where this goes.” She closed her eyes and put her other hand through the bars too, and just held on to his hands.

Unusually quiet, Duo just sat with her for a few long breaths, head bent down as if in prayer but with his eyes open and unfocused. When he spoke his words were careful and slow. 

“You can’t give up yet, Hil.”

“I…” she began, then stopped. She didn’t have an answer for that which he would accept. But he wasn’t waiting for her reply.

“Did you tell anybody else?”

“No, not yet.”

“Good. Don’t.”

“Duo, I have to.”

“Why? You’re already in quarantine. What difference does it make?” He had a point, and when she didn’t argue again, he said “Ok?”

“Yeah. Ok.” She let go with one of her hands and picked up a little towel to wipe the tears from her face.

A voice called from the stairwell. “Maxwell, break’s over. Get your ass up here before Henderson notices you’re late.” 

Duo gave her hand a squeeze before letting go as he sat up on his knees. “You’re strong. Just hold on. It won’t be long now.” Then he gathered up his gear and disappeared up the stairs.

 

She slept again, and when she woke someone had left her a ration, so she ate it mechanically. Time stretched on, and no one came down to see her, not even Duo, although she had waited what felt like much longer than a shift would last. 

When she heard footsteps on the stairs and saw that it was Henderson himself coming down to see her, she knew something was wrong. She rose stiffly and saluted - he was old military, like many of the Preventers, but unlike most he was a stickler for protocol. He returned the salute and stood well back from her cell. Behind him was Yao, holding a box in his hands.

She didn’t particularly want to reminisce about that conversation, one-sided as it was. There was a lot of passive voice - “a decision had been made”, “an operational necessity”. She figured out very quickly that he’d come to tell her they were moving the squad - without her. They would, of course, attempt to send a party with “appropriate medical skills and equipment” to extract her if possible, but she should be prepared for the worst.

And honestly, it was a private relief. She wouldn’t have to worry about the humiliation of succumbing to madness in front of her colleagues, wouldn’t have to put them through the pain of seeing her die by inches. And most important to her - because she had joined Preventers out of a zeal to help others which had never truly faded - she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone when she changed.

“Do you have any questions, Schbeiker?” he had finally asked.

“May I see my squadmates, sir?”

He actually did look regretful. “That would  
be...unwise. It would make things difficult for them.” As much as she hated it, she could see his point. They needed to focus on staying alive.

“Then, just Maxwell, sir?”

He nodded briskly. “Fine. It may be a while, I believe he is on duty.”

Then Yao had silently handed her the contents of the box through the cell hatch - four rations and six waters, enough to last a week if she was very careful. The final object in the box was a pistol and a single bullet. She shook her head. “You’ll need every gun.” 

_That was classy, right?_ she had smirked to herself after they had filed back up the stairs. _I’d like to be remembered as a bit of a bad-ass_. And was that so selfish, to want to go out with a little pride? To know that when the survivors toasted “to Schbeiker”, their last memory of her would be _her_ , not some mindless, twisted form?

 _So much for that._ Now she had her freedom and her best friend by her side, which by any normal standard should feel like a miracle. But she couldn’t conjure up any hope, only a gnawing fear of the unknown - what had happened while she was unconscious, what was to come as her infection progressed.

She sighed and gave in a little to the urge to twist by shifting her torso to lie on her side facing Duo while leaving her legs flat. “So, where are we?” she asked. “ And what’s the plan?”

He took a final shaving off the wire and set his tool down. “Somewhere around Dock 16. And the plan is to work our way towards 18 - preferably arriving after the ESUN ships come in and take over command, because our own might not be entirely happy to see me or you, and I want to make sure you get into sickbay without any...complications. But getting there has hit a bit of a snag - there’s a lot of those little bastards in our path. I picked off a few on the edges that were onesy-twosy with a shotgun plus the flashbangs, but I’m all outta fireworks now. And then my radio went.”

“So I decided we’d hunker down for a bit. I’ve been through most of surrounding buildings looking for food, water, tools, oxygen in case the scrubbers shut down. Bringing it all back in here. This warehouse was my best find - has an old airlock at the end of this aisle, and those doors are as secure as we’re gonna get. Figure we can use it as a bolt hole if it comes to that - got pretty much everything in there already.” He smoothed out the fine metal wires he had exposed and then secured them to the contacts of his radio’s charger with a strip of tape. “Wish I knew how many volts this thing takes.”

She lapsed into silence again as he fiddled with his batteries. Her eyes had adjusted a bit and she could see a large plastic pushcart behind him, the bottom level loaded with expensive bottled ‘energy’ water and tubs of - was that weight gain powder? He must have found cargo destined for a fitness store. That would explain his vest - originally designed for working out with added weight, but he’d ripped the top seams to get the lead out and loaded it with shotgun shells. Not bad. The top of the cart was empty; that’d probably been where he’d been carrying her. It looked stained with something dark, like dried blood.

He followed her gaze and broke in. “Hey, you want something to eat? We got chocolate and berry protein powder, and also some honey granules... I don’t recommend mixing it all together.” He clutched at his stomach for effect and she saw as he leaned forward that under his vest he was bandaged too, the white gauze lightly spotted through with red. She was instantly horrified.

“Your chest...you got stung?” 

“Hey, hey, it’s not that,” he said immediately, scuttling over to her and taking her hand. “They didn’t touch me. Honest.”

She squeezed his hand and didn’t let go. “Duo, tell me what you’re hiding from me. How did I get shot? How did you get hurt?” His face fell. “Please.”

“Look. Don’t be upset. I...I couldn’t leave you there to die, Hil. You know there wasn’t much chance we could come back for you in time. It just wasn’t right - all you had done was _survive_ longer than anyone else that got stung, and they still labeled you ‘infected’ and threw you in there to rot.” His voice had taken on a vicious edge that chilled her. “You would have starved to death - and for what? Because they wouldn’t even risk the small chance that you might change and hurt someone before you were stopped, even though you’ve risked your life to save their sorry asses over and over... They’re draggin’ Oswo who’s amputated at the knee with them, but they wouldn’t take you.” He stared levelly at her, the contempt burning in his eyes, almost daring her to say something in their defense, but she stayed silent. He relented and looked down.

“So after they all left - they made me leave with them, I mean, and I went along long enough so they weren’t watching me quite so close - I snuck off, doubled back and broke you out. When I found you I couldn’t wake you up - you were out like a light - so I broke into the janitor’s room and got a cart to move you on. Came in pretty handy for grabbin’ stuff too. I kept waiting for you to wake up, but you stayed unconscious so long it scared me, more than a whole day.” 

“Then you finally started to come to, but...it was all wrong. It wasn’t like the others, you didn’t start whaling away and twisting about. Just, your eyes were wrong, and you didn’t seem to see me, and then on your arm where you first got stung the skin started cracking open,” he said, tearing up, “and just - spikes were growing out. And I was thinkin’ to shoot you because maybe it wasn’t _you_ anymore but I couldn’t, and then I didn’t even see it coming...you moved so fast. I always used to tease you at training but damn, you were too fast,” and now he was crying in his weird, silent way and she didn’t know what to do except not let go of his hand.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s ok. It’s not bad, really. Just a slash, not too deep, ribs did their job. But... the spike was hollow, and when it hit me, it shattered. There were a few jagged little splinters that worked their way into the wound - I could feel ‘em moving farther down. When I cleaned the wound I tried to dig one out, but it hurt so much I thought I might pass out, and it seemed to encourage it to worm its way deeper, so I stopped. But, they’re really quite small - so if it’s gonna happen to me, I figure it'll be slow, right?” He shrugged, but she’d heard the real fear in his voice.

The realization that she’d infected him was taking the breath out of her lungs, but Duo’s story still wasn’t quite adding up. “And then?” Making him go on hardly seemed fair, but she just wanted out with all of it. And maybe he did, too, because he rested his face on his shoulder and spoke in that voice she knew wouldn’t hide anything else.

“And then, I shot. I shot my best friend, and honestly I was aiming to kill, but I winged you with a body shot instead. It stopped you for a moment, though; you seemed...shocked. So I beat you with the handle of my gun on the head ‘till you went down.”

“I couldn’t stop and think about what I had done because I was afraid the creatures would have heard the shot and honed in on it, so I just unlocked my handcuff and left you there. I didn’t run, just quietly walked away and hid, for oh, maybe 10 minutes. And then I turned around and walked right back because I owed you that much; a clean out, not leaving you there wounded, to get scavenged by those bastards. But when I came back, your arm had closed up and the spikes were all husky and crumbling off, and your wound had bled out a fair bit, and you were just - _you_ again. I rushed to plug up the entry wound to stop the bleeding.”

“I’d almost left you to die - and that realization turned my stomach like nothing else so far had, somehow, so I puked up my guts, and then I put you back on the cart and brought you here.” 

“Got us both cleaned up with the med kit, and a change of clothes,” he said, reaching out two of his cuffed hand’s fingers to pull at her too-long sleeve. “Sorry about that, I know you hate pea green, couldn’t really be helped. After all that, I didn’t really feel like going out again, so I just settled in to a nice long inventory check.” 

He finally looked up at her, and they were close enough that she could see the dark spots under his eyes and the deep weariness in his face. “Lotta kitchen stuff mostly - big bowls, spatulas, commercial blenders in here. Wufei gets flamethrowers.”

Hilde laughed through her own tears. “Damnit, Duo.”

“And then you were a-stirrin and I handcuffed us together again to see how you would rise - and that is _truly_ everything,” he said, making the sign of the cross; a half-reverent, half-puckish private joke he used to sign the end of his personal confessions.

She shook their clasped hands firmly. “I believe you.”

He gave her a tug back as he stood. “So, how ‘bout a protein shake? Nice n’ warm n’ gritty.” 

“Mmm, let me sit up first for a minute, okay?” She wanted a chance to process. 

She was the patient zero of a dangerous new kind of alien infection, one that could transmit from human to human. And the first person she had infected was Duo. The pain of it was crushing her heart, and she felt dangerously close to some wild, frenzied despair.

 _Ok, Hilde_ , she told herself, _does this actually change what I need to do_? After a moment she decided that it had not. She hadn’t really thought far enough ahead to come up with a plan since her circumstances had changed, but Duo’s was a sound one: get to the ESUN ships for rescue and treatment. While she held no hope for herself, Duo’s infection was still so fresh, and he hasn’t manifested any symptoms yet; surely there was something they could do. _Please, God. Please_.

But could she take the risk of getting close to other people, knowing that she didn’t have much time left, and that she was both violent and contagious? Duo said he’d tried to kill her, but he’d missed at such close range. Had he really tried? And could she count on him to do it again? She looked up and realized he was still waiting for an answer. 

She nodded and pulled herself up his arm to stand, finding that once she was on her feet it seemed to relive the impulse to twist, for which she was grateful. They walked together over to the cart, testing her wound on the way. It would be slow going; the pain was bearable, but too much movement was liable to open it back up, and she had already lost a lot of blood.

The protein shakes were terrible. She was halfway through her second helping when the radio crackled.

“Max—-el, —por-.”

He moved so fast he swung her around, pulled by the wrist, then half-lifted her in his haste to get the rest of the way there. They both sat still next to it and held a breath, ears straining for more, but except for a burst of static, it was silent.

After a minute Duo shook his head. “There’s too much interference. We’re in pretty deep. At least we know we got this working again.” He patted the hacked together radio. “And that someone’s calling for me on my channel - dunno if that’s a good sign or not.”

“Could it be the ESUN ships?”

“Mmmm,” he muttered, looking at his watch. “Maybe. I don’t have the best intel on that. Wufei and Charles had been ‘forgetting’ to switch to a secure channel when discussing the arrival, but that trick dried up before my radio went. I s’pose we should gear up and go out far enough to make contact - then if the calvary is here we can make a run for it without delay. Alright?”

Twenty minutes later they were sitting side by side, a duffle bag and backpack in front of them. Duo was finishing packing while Hilde bound the radio-and-battery cludge together with tape. She looked up to see Duo moving bottles of ‘energy’ water into the duffel bag.

“Hey, don’t take all the water out of my pack.”

“I’m not, I’m just evening us up. You put too much in there.”

She grabbed the backpack out of his hands and lifted it up by one strap. “Duo, you took half the weight out of it!”

“Yeah, well, you’ve been _shot_.”

“That doesn’t affect how much I can carry on my back.” She put down the radio and lifted his duffel bag a fraction off the ground with a lurch. “And this is going to wear you down.”

“It’ll get lighter as we use up the water, and we can toss something if we have to. Just leave it be. We need to finish.” He pulled the duffel bag back in front of himself.

She suppressed a response - to be honest, she really _had_ overpacked the backpack, rationalizing that she would be slower anyway, and that he was already tired while she was well rested. She was about to let the whole thing go when something about it clicked. 

_We’ve always been like this_ , she realized. They both went through life with a chip on their shoulder, needing to prove to the world - and perhaps even more to each other - that they were tough enough, strong enough, worthy. Their friendship was one of encouraging and lifting each other up, but also of egos clashing, shoulders jostling, that little voice that never stopped asking “Do you respect me? Can you, will you really trust me?” 

And for the thrill of every “yes” - like four years ago when she had half-led, half-dragged him wounded out of hostile territory, or just last year when he had defused the booby-trapped pressure plate she’d stepped on when there was no time to wait for the bomb squad - there were also a lot of painful “no”s. Those were the times they had reverted back to an instinct that they could never quite shake, a mixture of pride and love and fear that made them unable to relinquish the need to take the greater share of risk or the bigger burden.

She couldn’t minimize what he’d done for her. If Duo made it out of this, there was a very strong chance he’d go to prison for years, if not decades. At the very least, he’d never be a Preventer again. 

_I can’t say if what he did was right, but I know there’s nobody else that would have done what he did for me. But I don’t just want him ‘for’ me, I want him ‘with’ me - and I don’t know if I can have that if we keep this up. What else is he going to sacrifice?_

To be fair, she should ask herself the same question. She was absolutely ready to sacrifice her life - and justifiably so, she felt, under the circumstances - but she knew if their places were reversed, she would hate for Duo to feel that way, would tell him to keep fighting and not give up too soon. 

That insight didn’t make it any easier for her to think about enduring as she got sicker and sicker, though; instead she only felt more conflicted. As if to drive the point home, the muscles in her neck suddenly tried to snap her head backward, and her whole body flinched with the effort it took to suppress it.

 _Damnit_. Why didn’t she trust him to kill her if he had to? And was there some way to change that?

She became aware he was kneeling by her side - after all, he couldn’t go far. “All set?” he asked. She handed him the radio and tried to regain her focus.

“Almost. I need a weapon. Do we have anything other than that pistol and the shotgun?”

“No,” he said slowly. “And the pistol’s only got four bullets left. It’s hardly even worth using against those things anyway, yaknow? Shotgun’s much more effective and I’ve got plenty of ammo. And anyway you can’t shoot with your right hand because—“ He shook the handcuff chain. 

Hilde didn’t know what to make of his sudden reluctance. “Then I’ll make do with my left, it’s not like we haven’t practiced. You can’t use it while you’re holding the shotgun anyway, so I might as well take it - four bullets is better than none.” She held out her hand.

He started to unthread his belt from the sidearm holster, but his movements were hesitant. Her thoughts of a moment ago came back to her.

“What is this? Don’t you trust me?”

He looked pained by the accusation. “Of course I trust you.”

“Is it - is it because of what I did to you? Are you afraid I’m going to attack you again?” 

“No, Hil, no,” he reassured. “I don’t think that the…that when you’re like that…has much use for guns, anyway.” He finished taking it off and offered up the holstered gun, handle first. She took it with both hands, numbly following routine to check and then reholster it before looping it through her own belt on her left side. He stood close so her cuffed hand would have enough slack. When she was done she looked up and tried to read his face, but it was expressionless, except for his troubled eyes. 

_There’s something he’s afraid to trust me with, too_. A resolve crystallized in her mind.

She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, just hanging on for a moment until he gave her his full attention. “Before we go out there, I need to ask you something.” He cocked his head.

“Duo, for all your anger at Henderson for leaving me behind, it’s me you’re really angry at, isn’t it? Because I think you knew I wanted to stay and die in that cell, that after seeing what happened to my team, I didn’t want to take that chance that when I lost control I would hurt someone else. I’m sorry that I didn’t get a chance to tell you myself.”

“First of all, don’t tell me I’m not angry at Henderson,” Duo shot back heatedly. “He put me on back-to-back guard duty while he set up the redeployment plan so I wouldn’t find up what he was up to. And then when I tried to go see you, that rat-bastard and Yao’s team were waiting. It was a setup, Hilde; they had four people on me before I could blink. He told me you had “accepted your duty” and that I should “respect your sacrifice” and a bunch of garbage like that. I begged him to take you with us, or let me stay with you, but Henderson said he would go down and put a bullet in your head himself if I tried anything.”

She was shocked. “He told me that you could come see me before you left... I was waiting.”

He rattled their cuffs. “Where do you think I got a pair of handcuffs from, anyway? Gift from Hendy. I was wearing them from that moment ‘till I escaped.”

“Alright, so Henderson _is_ a rat-bastard and he was happy to leave me to die. But if you didn’t believe that I was ready to do it, then why the handcuffs, Duo? You said we were handcuffed together the first time I woke up after you broke me out.” He looked away.

“Oh I don’t think so,” she said, giving the hand still on his shoulder a shake. “Look at me. Why?”

“They were insurance, ok? I couldn’t be sure when you woke up that you weren’t ...gone, and if you were I couldn’t let you run around loose. That’s all.” His gaze slid down to land on his own cuffed hand and the chain trailing back to hers.

“Is that so? Then why are we still wearing them, Duo?”

“Because...things might happen fast.”

“What ‘things’? ‘Things’ like me turning into a mindless monster? Or is it something else? What are you afraid of, Duo?”

“Where are ya goin’ with this, Hil?” he ground out in a low voice that was rough with emotion. “I’m just doin’ my best to save your life.”

“I don’t _have_ a life anymore!” she exploded. “All I had was a chance to die before I hurt someone, and you took that away from me!”

Her hand on his shoulder became a sudden push backwards, catching him off balance, causing him to fall back a step into a wider stance. His brow, already furrowed in confusion and pain, sharpened into alarm, and he shifted his weight forward. 

Her own voice was choked up with tears now. “Please, Duo. I’m asking you to understand what you’re asking from me, what _I’m_ afraid of. I already feel like I’m getting closer and closer to losing control. I don’t know if I have much time left. I don’t want to die, but I can’t let myself hurt you again—“

His expression barely changed, but she saw the telltale movement of his eyes just as his right hand shot out for her gun and his left went to clamp over her left wrist. Unable to react in time, she let him focus on taking the weapon while she twisted her left wrist out of his hold. Her cuffed right hand snaked diagonally under and around his right arm as he retracted it, trapping his right wrist in the short handcuff chain and jerking his handcuffed left wrist to full extension. She hooked the fingers of her left hand into the slack of her own handcuff to pull the chain tighter around his right wrist, making a painfully tight loop.

The pistol slipped from his grip and clattered onto the floor, but she didn’t relent, stepping off to his right and behind and switching her left hand to grasp and twist his right forearm while her right hand locked out his elbow. His left arm flailed but was held taut by the straining handcuff that was cutting into her own right forearm. With a shove she forced him down to the ground.

“Stop! Duo, stop!” she barked in his ear, panting, just barely keeping her footing as he tried to use his superior mass and strength to shift her up, regardless of the damage it would do to his own shoulder. “Just stop and listen to me for a minute, damnit! I’m not gonna kill myself in front of you, how stupid do you think I am?” She kept him in the lock a few seconds more, until she felt the subtle shift that meant he was relaxing - or pretending to. She let up and stepped back around in front of him, then fell to her knees, winded and in pain from the strain she’d put on her own hypermobile joints. He rose to a crouch and glared at her, breathing hard and wiping sweat from his eyes. 

After she caught her breath, Hilde scooted a little closer. “Listen. I’ll make you a deal, ok? I swear to you I won’t take my own life. Instead, I’m going to trust you with my death - that you’ll make the right decision and stop me before I hurt anyone again. Because that’s the only way I can give you what you want - for me to let myself live long enough for chance to be cured. I hate to give up that control, but I’ll do it. _But only if you are willing to do the same for me._ ”

“I know you’ve done the impossible for me. But you’re doing it at a cost to yourself. You’ve already destroyed your career and infected your body, and I’m afraid how much further you’re willing to go. My life is not worth your death to me. At some point our lives have to have equal value. At some point what each of us wants has to matter.”

“So I’ll go, but only if you give me what I’m offering you. Only if you’ll put your faith in me, and swear to focus on doing everything you can to survive and make it to that ship so they can save you. That’s my price.” 

She could see him churning through that, his jaw working as he faced the unfamiliar stark honesty of it. She saw him battling the raw fear of the loss of control over her fate, however much of an illusion that control might be.

“Duo.” She caught his eyes, then lifted up the handcuff on her right wrist with her left hand and watched his shocked expression as she contorted the bones and ligaments of her right palm and slid it easily off. “This isn’t what’s keeping me here with you, you know.” He took a ragged breath as it all sunk in.

He finally let out a “Damn!” that was both fond and a curse in the same breath, and gave her a little wan smile. “Alright. We’ll do it your way.”

“We’ll do it together. Deal?”

“Deal.” And they shook with their now free hands, the cuff still dangling from his.

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by re-watching “Lily C.A.T.”, an 80’s anime which is essentially a rip-off of “Alien” except (spoiler alert) the threat is an alien pathogen that gets aboard a deep-space vessel and turns the crew into monsters. It has a scene where two of the people trapped on the contaminated ship get handcuffed together (note: not a super bright idea in a horror movie!) that always stuck with me…


End file.
